Ric Holt

Richard Craig Holt, known as Ric Holt, was an American-Canadian computer scientist, born on 13 February 1941 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, who later moved to Toronto. He graduated from Cornell University in engineering physics in 1964, spent a year in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, worked for IBM, and returned to Cornell for a doctorate in computer science in 1970 under Alan Shaw. He joined the University of Toronto in 1970 and the University of Waterloo in 1997, where he stayed until his retirement in 2014. His main research areas were operating systems, programming languages and software engineering, with foundational work on deadlock and the development of several compilers and compilation techniques. His Turing programming language was used in universities and high schools in Canada and abroad, and he took part in developing Grok, Euclid, SP/k and S/SL. His company Holt Software Associates made the Ready to Program environment used in Canadian high schools. He received the OS-CAN/INFO-CAN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 and died on 12 April 2019 on Quadra Island, British Columbia.